Does the United
States still have the same level of control over the
energy resources of theMiddle East as
it once had?

The major energy-producing countries are still firmly
under the control of the Western-backed dictatorships.
So, actually, the progress made by the Arab Spring is
limited, but it’s not insignificant. The
Western-controlled dictatorial system is eroding. In
fact, it’s been eroding for some time. So, for example,
if you go back 50 years, the energy resources -- the
main concern of U.S. planners -- have been mostly
nationalized. There are constantly attempts to reverse
that, but they have not succeeded.

Take the U.S. invasion of Iraq, for example. To everyone
except a dedicated ideologue, it was pretty obvious that
we invaded Iraq not because of our love of democracy but
because it’s maybe the second- or third-largest source
of oil in the world, and is right in the middle of the
major energy-producing region. You’re not supposed to
say this. It’s considered a conspiracy theory.

The United States was seriously defeated in Iraq by
Iraqi nationalism -- mostly by nonviolent resistance.
The United States could kill the insurgents, but they
couldn’t deal with half a million people demonstrating
in the streets. Step by step, Iraq was able to dismantle
the controls put in place by the occupying forces. By
November 2007, it was becoming pretty clear that it was
going to be very hard to reach U.S. goals. And at that
point, interestingly, those goals were explicitly
stated. So in November 2007 the Bush II administration
came out with an official declaration about what any
future arrangement with Iraq would have to be. It had
two major requirements: one, that the United States must
be free to carry out combat operations from its military
bases, which it will retain; and two, “encouraging the
flow of foreign investments to Iraq, especially American
investments.” In January 2008, Bush made this clear in
one of his signing statements. A couple of months later,
in the face of Iraqi resistance, the United States had
to give that up. Control of Iraq is now disappearing
before their eyes.

Iraq was an attempt to reinstitute by force something
like the old system of control, but it was beaten back.
In general, I think, U.S. policies remain constant,
going back to the Second World War. But the capacity to
implement them is declining.

Declining because
of economic weakness?

Partly because the world is just becoming more diverse.
It has more diverse power centers. At the end of the
Second World War, the United States was absolutely at
the peak of its power. It had half the world’s wealth
and every one of its competitors was seriously damaged
or destroyed. It had a position of unimaginable security
and developed plans to essentially run the world -- not
unrealistically at the time.

This was called
“Grand Area” planning?

Yes. Right after the Second World War, George Kennan,
head of the U.S. State Department policy planning staff,
and others sketched out the details, and then they were
implemented. What’s happening now in the Middle East and
North Africa, to an extent, and in South America
substantially goes all the way back to the late 1940s.
The first major successful resistance to U.S. hegemony
was in 1949. That’s when an event took place, which,
interestingly, is called “the loss of China.” It’s a
very interesting phrase, never challenged. There was a
lot of discussion about who is responsible for the loss
of China. It became a huge domestic issue. But it’s a
very interesting phrase. You can only lose something if
you own it. It was just taken for granted: we possess
China -- and if they move toward independence, we’ve
lost China. Later came concerns about “the loss of Latin
America,” “the loss of the Middle East,” “the loss of”
certain countries, all based on the premise that we own
the world and anything that weakens our control is a
loss to us and we wonder how to recover it.

Today, if you read, say, foreign policy journals or, in
a farcical form, listen to the Republican debates,
they’re asking, “How do we prevent further losses?”

On
the other hand, the capacity to preserve control has
sharply declined. By 1970, the world was already what
was called tripolar economically, with a U.S.-based
North American industrial center, a German-based
European center, roughly comparable in size, and a
Japan-based East Asian center, which was then the most
dynamic growth region in the world. Since then, the
global economic order has become much more diverse. So
it’s harder to carry out our policies, but the
underlying principles have not changed much.

Take the Clinton doctrine. The Clinton doctrine was that
the United States is entitled to resort to unilateral
force to ensure “uninhibited access to key markets,
energy supplies, and strategic resources.” That goes
beyond anything that George W. Bush said. But it was
quiet and it wasn’t arrogant and abrasive, so it didn’t
cause much of an uproar. The belief in that entitlement
continues right to the present. It’s also part of the
intellectual culture.

Right after the assassination of Osama bin Laden, amid
all the cheers and applause, there were a few critical
comments questioning the legality of the act. Centuries
ago, there used to be something called presumption of
innocence. If you apprehend a suspect, he’s a suspect
until proven guilty. He should be brought to trial. It’s
a core part of American law. You can trace it back to
Magna Carta. So there were a couple of voices saying
maybe we shouldn’t throw out the whole basis of
Anglo-American law. That led to a lot of very angry and
infuriated reactions, but the most interesting ones
were, as usual, on the left liberal end of the spectrum.
Matthew Yglesias, a well-known and highly respected left
liberal commentator, wrote an article in which he
ridiculed these views. He said they’re “amazingly
naive,” silly. Then he expressed the reason. He said
that “one of the main functions of the international
institutional order is precisely to legitimate the use
of deadly military force by western powers.” Of course,
he didn’t mean Norway. He meant the United States. So
the principle on which the international system is based
is that the United States is entitled to use force at
will. To talk about the United States violating
international law or something like that is amazingly
naive, completely silly. Incidentally, I was the target
of those remarks, and I’m happy to confess my guilt. I
do think that Magna Carta and international law are
worth paying some attention to.

I
merely mention that to illustrate that in the
intellectual culture, even at what’s called the left
liberal end of the political spectrum, the core
principles haven’t changed very much. But the capacity
to implement them has been sharply reduced. That’s why
you get all this talk about American decline. Take a
look at the year-end issue of Foreign Affairs,
the main establishment journal. Its big front-page cover
asks, in bold face, “Is America Over?” It’s a standard
complaint of those who believe they should have
everything. If you believe you should have everything
and anything gets away from you, it’s a tragedy, the
world is collapsing. So is America over? A long time ago
we “lost” China, we’ve lost Southeast Asia, we’ve lost
South America. Maybe we’ll lose the Middle East and
North African countries. Is America over? It’s a kind of
paranoia, but it’s the paranoia of the superrich and the
superpowerful. If you don’t have everything, it’s a
disaster.

The New York
Times describes the “defining policy quandary of the
Arab Spring: how to square contradictory American
impulses that include support for democratic change, a
desire for stability, and wariness of Islamists who have
become a potent political force.” The Times
identifies three U.S. goals. What do you make of them?

Two of them are accurate. The United States is in favor
of stability. But you have to remember what stability
means. Stability means conformity to U.S. orders. So,
for example, one of the charges against Iran, the big
foreign policy threat, is that it is destabilizing Iraq
and Afghanistan. How? By trying to expand its influence
into neighboring countries. On the other hand, we
“stabilize” countries when we invade them and destroy
them.

I’ve occasionally quoted one of my favorite
illustrations of this, which is from a well-known, very
good liberal foreign policy analyst, James Chace, a
former editor of Foreign Affairs. Writing about
the overthrow of the Salvador Allende regime and the
imposition of the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet in
1973, he said that we had to “destabilize” Chile in the
interests of “stability.” That’s not perceived to be a
contradiction -- and it isn’t. We had to destroy the
parliamentary system in order to gain stability, meaning
that they do what we say. So yes, we are in favor of
stability in this technical sense.

Concern about political Islam is just like concern about
any independent development. Anything that’s independent
you have to have concern about because it might
undermine you. In fact, it’s a little ironic, because
traditionally the United States and Britain have by and
large strongly supported radical Islamic fundamentalism,
not political Islam, as a force to block secular
nationalism, the real concern. So, for example, Saudi
Arabia is the most extreme fundamentalist state in the
world, a radical Islamic state. It has a missionary
zeal, is spreading radical Islam to Pakistan, funding
terror. But it’s the bastion of U.S. and British policy.
They’ve consistently supported it against the threat of
secular nationalism from Gamal Abdel Nasser’s Egypt and
Abd al-Karim Qasim’s Iraq, among many others. But they
don’t like political Islam because it might become
independent.

The first of the three points, our yearning for
democracy, that’s about on the level of Joseph Stalin
talking about the Russian commitment to freedom,
democracy, and liberty for the world. It’s the kind of
statement you laugh about when you hear it from
commissars or Iranian clerics, but you nod politely and
maybe even with awe when you hear it from their Western
counterparts.

If
you look at the record, the yearning for democracy is a
bad joke. That’s even recognized by leading scholars,
though they don’t put it this way. One of the major
scholars on so-called democracy promotion is Thomas
Carothers, who is pretty conservative and highly
regarded -- a neo-Reaganite, not a flaming liberal. He
worked in Reagan’s State Department and has several
books reviewing the course of democracy promotion, which
he takes very seriously. He says, yes, this is a
deep-seated American ideal, but it has a funny history.
The history is that every U.S. administration is
“schizophrenic.” They support democracy only if it
conforms to certain strategic and economic interests. He
describes this as a strange pathology, as if the United
States needed psychiatric treatment or something. Of
course, there’s another interpretation, but one that
can’t come to mind if you’re a well-educated, properly
behaved intellectual.

Within several
months of the toppling of [President Hosni] Mubarak in
Egypt, he was in the dock facing criminal charges and
prosecution. It’s inconceivable that U.S. leaders will
ever be held to account for their crimes in Iraq or
beyond. Is that going to change anytime soon?

That’s basically the Yglesias principle: the very
foundation of the international order is that the United
States has the right to use violence at will. So how can
you charge anybody?

And no one else
has that right.

Of course not. Well, maybe our clients
do. If Israel invades Lebanon and kills a thousand
people and destroys half the country, okay, that’s all
right. It’s interesting. Barack Obama was a senator
before he was president. He didn’t do much as a senator,
but he did a couple of things, including one he was
particularly proud of. In fact, if you looked at his
website before the primaries, he highlighted the fact
that, during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in 2006, he
cosponsored a Senate resolution demanding that the
United States do nothing to impede Israel’s military
actions until they had achieved their objectives and
censuring Iran and Syria because they were supporting
resistance to Israel’s destruction of southern Lebanon,
incidentally, for the fifth time in 25 years. So they
inherit the right. Other clients do, too.

But the rights really reside in Washington. That’s what
it means to own the world. It’s like the air you
breathe. You can’t question it. The main founder of
contemporary IR [international relations] theory, Hans
Morgenthau, was really quite a decent person, one of the
very few political scientists and international affairs
specialists to criticize the Vietnam War on moral, not
tactical, grounds. Very rare. He wrote a book called
The Purpose of American Politics. You already know
what’s coming. Other countries don’t have purposes. The
purpose of America, on the other hand, is
“transcendent”: to bring freedom and justice to the rest
of the world. But he’s a good scholar, like Carothers.
So he went through the record. He said, when you study
the record, it looks as if the United States hasn’t
lived up to its transcendent purpose. But then he says,
to criticize our transcendent purpose “is to fall into
the error of atheism, which denies the validity of
religion on similar grounds” -- which is a good
comparison. It’s a deeply entrenched religious belief.
It’s so deep that it’s going to be hard to disentangle
it. And if anyone questions that, it leads to near
hysteria and often to charges of anti-Americanism or
“hating America” -- interesting concepts that don’t
exist in democratic societies, only in totalitarian
societies and here, where they’re just taken for
granted.

Excerpted from Power Systems: Conversations on
Global Democratic Uprisings and the New Challenges to
U.S. Empire,published this month by
Metropolitan Books, an imprint of Henry Holt and
Company, LLC. Copyright (c) 2013 by Noam Chomsky and
David Barsamian. All rights reserved

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